


Recovery

by jalendavi_lady



Series: Myst: Achenar What If [1]
Category: Myst Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Family Drama, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Injury Recovery, NaNoWriMo 2017, Sibling Bonding, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-11 13:18:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 17,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15316335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jalendavi_lady/pseuds/jalendavi_lady
Summary: The ending of Revelation plays out differently and everyone has to deal with what it means when redemption does not equal death.Diverges from canon at the end of Revelation's playable content. Calls on material from all games and the tie-in novels.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I had actually debated keeping this an offline personal project, or at least holding off until the entire series was done (I have plotting and notes through Uru), due to the fact the particular source work was unavailable without paying for used discs and praying the workarounds for modern systems work.
> 
> Then GOG got their hands on the distribution permissions for the 25th anniversary...

There was something pressing against his face.

Breathing was difficult.

He fought against whatever was there, trying to break free, but something stronger than he was held him down, pinned his arms...

"Achenar, calm down." The voice was slow and even. "Relax and breathe."

Someone stronger, then.

He tried again, even more desperate to get loose.

"Please believe me," the voice pled. "You're safe, I swear it."

He collapsed into a fit of coughing.

"Achenar!" A hand on his, guiding it up...

He was wearing a breathing mask.

He coughed again, but just lay there.

Another hand at his forehead. "That's right. Rest. You've been injured."

He couldn't quite place the voice.

There wasn't supposed to be another voice. There wasn't supposed to be breathing equipment. He was on his own. If he was hurt too much for him to handle, he was supposed to simply die and face his judgment.

That's what being in a prison Age was.

"Where?" he gasped, a pained croak that left him trembling.

"You're in Tomahna, my son."

_ Father? _

"Do you remember what happened?"

He thought a moment. "Sirrus. Yeesha came for refuge." And then everything got strange.

"She's shaken but fine." A pause. "You breathed poison to save her. It nearly killed you. I expect everything would feel jumbled right now."

Achenar took a deep breath. It hurt. "You should have let it."

"No!" Atrus sounded horrified.

"I'd have stopped being a problem." He got his eyes just open enough to see that Atrus  _ looked _ horrified too. "Would've felt the same to me."

Atrus stroked a hand through his hair. "I'd rather you were a live problem."

It felt enough like being groomed that Achenar relaxed into the touch involuntarily.

"Mother?"

"She's away for a few days, thank the Maker. You should be at least recovered enough to be properly awake before she gets back. Losing Sirrus is going to be bad enough."

He coughed a few more times. "Something wrong with him from the start."

He knew he shouldn't have said it the moment he got the words out.

His offenses were his own. Sirrus might have led him there to start with, but his choices were his own.

"I've become inclined to agree."

It was the longest civil conversation they had had since Achenar was a teenager.

He tried to shift a little, but it was too much and he lay there trembling.

"Don't worry about anything right now," Atrus told him. "Your mother was already convinced you'd reformed, and if anyone else has a problem with us not deciding anything until after you can walk across a room..."

The hand in his hair stopped.

"Please..." he reflexively begged. Then he felt ashamed because he had no right to ask for any affection at all from his father. Not after what he'd done to him. Not after what he'd planned to do. What he and Sirrus had planned to do.

The hand began again. "I read your journals from Haven and on Serenia." Atrus' voice was nearly conversational. "You've slept for two days. I  _ know _ . And however I act toward you from now on, I do it  _ knowing _ ."

Achenar shivered under his touch. "I'm sorry."

"I believe that."

Silence between them.

"Yeesha?"

"My friend is watching her. She's not alone. He's not leaving until I can leave one or the other of you alone for an hour without risking a crisis." A heavy sigh. "And don't try to tell me she needs me more. She doesn't like me leaving you right now. Even when we were all sure you weren't ready to wake up again yet."

_ I love you, Lil Sis. _

He coughed. "Throat hurts."

"I can't risk giving you anything for the pain."

"Used to that. Never found anything on Haven."

A sort of casual low-level horror hung in the stillness that followed.

A prison age merely needed potable water, food of some sort however meager, and a means to avoid death by exposure. Less was an execution or murder outright.

Atrus hadn't considered natural medicinal sources when he wrote the Descriptive Book for Haven. Achenar had simply gone without.

"Maybe water?" Achenar finally suggested. But no, the mask covered his mouth. He regretted saying it even before Atrus had a chance to answer.

"By now, you probably need to drink anyway." Atrus seemed to consider how awkward it ws going to be. "And I think you may be okay without the extra oxygen for a few moments."

Achenar might not have had a science lesson in over two decades, but he knew that sounded scarier than it should have. "Father..."

"Fine, as in it won't harm you."

That wasn't reassuring either.

"You could survive without it now," Atrus told him quietly after a pause. "You would just feel worse for longer. I don't want that for you if we can avoid it."

Right. Of Course. The sooner he was well enough sending him away wouldn't be murder, the sooner he'd be gone. Mother wouldn't like it, but that's what would happen anyway.

Same as she'd had to  _ sneak _ him supplies behind his father's back. As if a new shirt could cut nara.

Maker be kind, if he'd read... he knew about the mangrees. About Shrieker.

Atrus might think sending him back to Haven was too dangerous for Haven.

"Achenar?" The hand in his hair moved to his forehead.

He was thinking more clearly now, properly awake, even if he was almost too tired to stay awake.

He couldn't let himself get used to this. He'd break again. He could blame some of the kills on the cerpatee, but trying to keep karnaks out with a ground-level fence...

Bent-Ear's mate was pregnant. If he went back to Haven, and broke enough to be a threat to the little one...

If they stopped trusting him near their children, he'd know. The poison he made from the bushes wasn't painful, only sedating, addling, and it worked on things larger than him. He'd... if they decided he was a threat...

Didn't matter if it was an offense against the Maker, not compared to the rest of what he'd done with his life. Trading his life for Yeesha's without thought for the consequences  _ might _ have been enough to keep him out of Jakooth's Age.

But he hadn't. He had survived. Mere willingness didn't count.

And so none of the old warnings about the final judgment before the Maker mattered.

"Achenar." He could hear the fear in his father's voice. "Please don't shut me out right now. I don't have a way of telling if you're unwilling to speak or unable to speak."

"Easier if I don't get used to this," Achenar tiredly told him. "Could break again."

Stillness.

"No matter what, I promise you it won't be like when you were first trapped on Haven. I won't do that to you, and your mother would never speak to me again if I tried."

Achenar managed to barely open his eyes again.

"We were trying to see if either of you was reformed enough to come home. If there was no chance you were, we wouldn't have let Yeesha get attached. I... Don't worry. It'll be okay."

Achenar focused on a glass of water sitting on a table behind him.

Atrus turned to follow his gaze just before Achenar couldn't keep his eyes open any longer.

"... I can assume it's been years since you could afford to have an aversion to drinking after someone, can't I?"

His father was so hesitant it was nearly comical.

Achenar didn't respond. The answer was obvious enough.

It was awkward and there was nearly more water on him than in him when it was over, but they managed.

"You should be stronger soon," Atrus assured him.

"Used to canteens," Achenar toldhim weakly. "No one to judge me for drinking straight from them all the time."

"Rest, now. All that can wait. Words will come easier when you've recovered more."

_ Here we go. _

And then Achenar realized that for once, he had absolutely nothing to lose. And his father was already on the defensive. If he simply admitted it...

"They won't."

He regretted it as soon as he said it.

"Son, you're addled right now. Give it a few days..."

Anger rose. Achenar tried to keep from showing it.

"Son, what..."

"Grandmother had figured it out," he blurted. "She was going to talk to you, only..."

Silence neither of them would break. They both knew what had happened.

"Words take me longer. She was willing to give me the time. And then no one was."

Uncomfortable silence.

"Messed up a few times, after you started visiting. No one on Haven cares if I say the wrong thing, too much, too little..."

"And then I decided you'd gone savage. Instead of recognizing it was just my son being my son." The guilt was thick in his voice. "I..."

For once, Atrus was the one who couldn't find words.

"Mangree's simple enough. Thought about trying to speak it properly. But I was never going to learn the Art."

"But how did you... Ah, I am stupid. The language of the tree dwellers was simpler than English or D'ni, and so many of the emotional modifiers were in delivery..."

He felt his face burn from shame.

He shouldn't have abused and exploited them.

He should have made up something about long-term cultural study and moved in. Changed his primary language by a necessity his father couldn't have denied.

He should have done a lot differently.

Atrus slipped a hand back into his hair. "By order of the Maker, time only moves one way." His words were soft. "You cannot go back and change anything, only go forward."

"I know." He leaned into the touch as much as he could.

"You've been living among social groomers," Atrus mused aloud, clearly amused at the thought.

"Yes,"Achenar admitted.

He heard his father start to stand again. He felt the hand leave him.

"Please..."

"I'm not going away." His footsteps did just that.

Then the bed under Achenar shifted as Atrus climbed in on his other side.

It was more than slightly frightening to have something as large as himself there next to him. His mind kept telling him he should run from the predator.

But then his father's hands found his hair.

"I knew hugging you would be a bad idea," the older man admitted. "But if this doesn't feel like a threat..."

What it felt like was when he'd twisted an ankle badly enough he'd been off his feet in the treestand for a week and the mangrees took turns comforting him through the sheer boredom of injury.

"It's not a threat."

"Good." A pause. "Then I won't bother warning Yeesha against braiding it."

Achenar smiled and yawned and slept.

 


	2. Chapter 2

He was too weak to sit but strong enough to not need the breathing support when Atrus decided he could handle having Yeesha around without her being a problem.

She was extremely cautious about approaching him. "Achenar?"

"Hey, Lil Sis. You doing okay?"

She nodded once. Then she blurted, "You're the one we were all scared about."

He'd practically died in her lap. Of course she'd been scared.

"We're both going to be okay," he told her. "I'm just glad I did that in time."

"It was weird, but it wasn't... bad," she told him. "Him describing it was worse than when it happened."

"I doubt that."

She stuck out her tongue at him.

He had to laugh.

She sat in a chair beside the bed. "You're really going to be fine? Really-really?"

"Really-really." He reached out and tugged lightly on her braid. "I'm more worried about you. Whole thing is like the start to one of Father's old D'ni legends about things that made people into the Maker's prophets."

"Prophetess."

"Oh?"

"If that's what happens to me, the correct term would be prophetess."

"If that's what happens to you, I'll be sad. Most of the ones changed by such things lead lives with sorrows."

She covered his hand in both of hers. "And growing up with brothers I could see but never touch isn't one?"

"That's going to change," he told her. "I don't know how, but I can't... Father's not going to do that again. They  _ know _ I'm no threat to you now."

"You weren't any threat to me then," she sniffed.

"Sirrus was. When you're older, you'll understand who I was when I was trapped there, Yeesha. Then, I probably would have been."

"Achenar..."

"It's true." He sighed. "Wishing things were different doesn't make them so."

She cautiously moved to hug him. "I'm glad they're different now. I like having a brother."

"I like having a sister."

Honestly, they could have said it on Haven. But there was always the risk she'd never be allowed back before she was an adult, if she was even allowed back at all.

And admitting it would have only hurt them both.

Now it didn't matter.

Nearly dying for her said more than any words ever could.

He wrapped his arms around her, trying to be careful. It had been so long...

"I hope they don't send you away again."

He sighed. "I've built a life there."

"But..."

"But we don't know what they'll say. Or how much of a say they'll let me have. Or if the rain will come tomorrow."

"Big Brother," she grumbled.

"It's true. And I know one person who won't get an official say in it because she's barely past nine."

Yeesha pouted.

"You know I'm right." He patted the back of her head. "It's not something you should worry about."

"Just because I shouldn't doesn't mean I won't."

He laughed weakly. "Grandmother would have loved you."

Yeesha pulled back and tilted her head. "Grandmother died when Father was born."

"We called Great-Grandmother Ti'ana 'Grandmother'. She always said the 'great' made her feel too old."

"I wish I could have met her."

"She was kind and wise. She had seen so much..."

Yeesha smiled. Then, she was intensely curious. "Did she ever talk about Great-Grandfather?"

"Very rarely. She didn't like to discuss the Fall. He was dying from the plague when he linked to a Death World."

"That's what Father told me." She looked down, sad. "I'd have liked to have met him, too. It sounds like he didn't care what people thought if he knew something was right, from what stories I've heard."

"I always thought the same. I didn't understand what that meant in practice, but I knew he was like that."

She tilted her head slightly.

"I think that's a 'you'll understand when you're older' thing, Yeesh."

The nickname hung in the air.

It stuck pleasantly and she didn't object.

Then she raised her head and stuck her tongue out at him.

"I mean it. I was on Haven before I understood."

"But..." She pouted even harder.

He sighed. "I suppose you've heard proverbs about what someone's like when only the Maker can see them?"

"Yep."

"Well, Great-Grandfather was that person all the time."

Her eyes widened. "How?"

"Not caring what it cost him, Grandmother said. And from what she said..."

"...it cost him everything," she finished solemnly.

He nodded. "It's taken a lot for me to understand. I've been a person to be ashamed of where only the Maker could see, too. Took not having anyone else around but the Maker to change that."

"I'm glad you changed," she told him quietly. "Even if it meant you weren't here."

"I'm here now," he told her. "And going nowhere else soon."

She hugged him again.

Atrus coughed from the doorway. "Your mother will be here tomorrow and you  _ both _ need rest before she gets here. I know you've only had a little while together, but..."

Achenar yawned theatrically in support of the statement.

"But..."

"I'll still be here, Yeesha. But Mother is going to have enough of a fit as it is without any of us making things worse."

She drew back and he could see the distress on her face.

"There's an imager feed from where she'll Link in and it's easy to hook up a monitor over there," Atrus told them, pointing. "I'll gladly let you two watch from here. You deserve to know what's going on."

"Are you two going to fight again?" Yeesha asked.

"You've been  _ fighting _ ?" Achenar echoed.

"Hopefully that's not going to happen tomorrow," Atrus assured them. "That's why she left, Achenar. We'd been arguing about you boys -- you especially -- and she needed some space before she did anything rash. And also to get her thoughts together." He made a face. "I think she decided she needed some time getting  _ her _ words together."

Achenar grinned.

"Anyway, she'll be here in the morning. I don't know how we'll handle sleeping arrangements tomorrow night, but we'll figure out something."

Yeesha nodded. She sniffled. She stood.

She impulsively hugged him again. "I love you, Brother."

It was the first time either of them had dared to use the word.

"I love you too, Yeesh." He hugged her back. "Now, go rest yourself or we'll have Mother fretting over both of us."

She made a face, kissed his forehead, and left.

Atrus was smiling sadly. "The D'ni would have said you two were at nearly the optimum spacing for siblings. I think I see why."

"Too distant for bad influences on the older, just distant enough for the older to be old enough to be a parent themselves and guide accordingly?"

Atrus blanched ever so slightly at the first point. "Roughly. It also meant full parental attention on one child at a time. Maybe I wouldn't have missed your little language problem if Sirrus hadn't..."

"If Sirrus hadn't been Sirrus. Face it, that's what you want to say."

"If the Maker were the only one who could hear me, that is definitely what I would want to say."

Their eyes met.

"After all the years of being told speaking ill of the dead was rude, to have my own child be a clear exception..." Atrus' voice broke and Achenar saw tears in his eyes.

It was disturbing. Atrus usually wasn't emotional like this.

But then he was a father who had just lost one child and nearly lost another at the same time. And if Sirrus had succeeded but been detected, it would have been all three of them.

"You've still got both of us," Achenar told him. "And whatever was wrong with him is not wrong with Yeesha. She just needs to finish growing up."

Atrus nodded.

"It was his own doing, Father. All of it. I don't think there's anything you could have done to prevent him from turning out wrong. Only prevented him from harming others. Or corrupting me as his accomplice."

"I wish I could have prevented that."

"My choices and my mistakes were my own," Achenar insisted.

Atrus nodded again.

"I... I don't want the possibility of losing myself like that. Being able to cause that much harm. Need to say it before Mother gets here and the arguments start. No use having my parents fight over whether I can go anywhere but here and Haven when I don't want to go anywhere but here and Haven."

"Achenar..."

"I'm comfortable there. I can think of some supplies I'd like that I can't make, and it'd be nice to have blank journals to use for a proper study of the mangree language, but that's not much. Metal's been the real limitation. I couldn't reforge anything, and even sharpening the knives I brought with me is a bother. No good whetstone source and no way to get wood dry enough for a really good fire."

Atrus stared at him. "I misjudged you."

"Father, you couldn't have known what my life was like there."

There was a long pause, as if Atrus was making sure he didn't have anything else to say.

He appreciated the gesture.

"I... I was judging both of you based in what you'd managed to do in isolation. Sirrus was using metal and harnessing static as an electricity source. But it was all in seeking a way out."

"And then he figured out how to break nara."

"He tricked us into giving him samples. A chess set."

"Mother had to sneak me shirts and you gave Sirrus a  _ chess set _ ."

"What supplies would you have asked for if you weren't going to be judged on it, weapons included?"

It was a matter-of-fact question but Achenar knew he was trying to distract from the evidence of favoritism.

"At least three new metal canteens, two whetstones for the lodges and a smaller one to carry, table utensils to replace what bent or broke past mending, and a few new hunting knives. I can make any other tool I use with a knife, but I can't make a new metal knife myself on Haven."

"And I would have seen knives as weapons."

"A knife is food, shelter, the ability to mend clothing, rope, trail clearing, self-defense against lesser predators, and the ability to cut hair. Just to start. Finding water and picking berries are nearly the only survival things I do that don't depend on a knife somehow, and that's if I don't carry the berries in a container."

"You talk to mangrees with a knife?"

"I bribe them with favors when things need cutting. And the sound boards required a knife, along with the stands they're in."

Atrus seemed to consider everything. "I'm honestly impressed with what you've done there given the limitations. I've never been forced to live anywhere near that technological level." He sighed. "And where I visited it, I could always consider the inhabitants primitive and go home if I wanted."

There was really nothing Achenar could say in response to that.

"Before your mother comes, I do have one more question."

"What is it?"

"You let me think your statement about having friends now meant you were psychologically unstable. Why didn't you let us know about the mangrees?"

"I was worried you'd remove me, put me somewhere else, if you knew you'd exposed them to me. They have a language, they give each other names... you would have never used Haven as a trap if you had known."

"I do have to admit that I would love to see your notes if you do end up doing that in-depth study of them. I've done cultural studies in the past, but never anywhere near that level of depth."

"Because you never moved in."

"One time I moved in. Unless you count my education with my father but they'd been so twisted to worship him that it  _ shouldn't _ count." He sat down. "And the contact changed Riven so much that it shouldn't count."

Achenar yawned uncontrollably.

Atrus walked over, patted him on the shoulder. "Try to get some sleep while you can. Tomorrow promises to be long and uncomfortable."

"How is that unlike every single family spat we've ever had?"

"Your mother and I will be doing a lot more crying, for one thing."

 


	3. Chapter 3

Yeesha insisted on watching the imager while cuddled up against him.

Eventually he was going to need to get her to find a different way to feel secure, but for now it was still amazing to simply be allowed to touch each other.

Right now, Atrus was worriedly pacing.

"Whatever happens, remember that none of this is your fault," Achenar told Yeesha. "It was a smart move to run to Haven. If he hadn't followed you, you'd have just needed to sit tight and safe until Father figured out where you went. You'd have been able to signal me, and I could have gotten food and a full canteen to you easily. You didn't do anything you shouldn't have done."

"Right." She didn't sound convinced.

But if the arguments had gotten bad enough for their mother to flee to another Age for a respite from them...

"None of this is your fault, Yeesh Keep telling yourself that until you believe it."

"I'm the one who fell for the chess set request."

"No,  _ Father _ fell for the chess set request. You are a child who should not expect herself to see through what adults do."

She nodded and cuddled closer.

Father hadn't needed to warn her to give Achenar time to put words together. She seemed to have figured it out on her own.

That and she was young enough to not have an adult's speed with language yet herself.

"And we all love you and will be making sure you are okay no matter what gets decided about me."

She didn't answer. She just clung tighter.

Their mother Linked in. "Atrus, I..."

It was clear she realized something was wrong.

"Catherine my love, there's been a tragedy. I couldn't leave to tell you or I would have." He embraced her. "The arguments don't matter anymore."

"Atrus? What happened?"

They both sat down, not letting go, and Achenar was sure Atrus had steered her to the bench.

"The chess set Sirrus asked for was a trick. He needed nara samples to test resonance bombs on."

"Sweet Maker. He broke loose? He was deceiving us all along?"

"The entire time. The rest of his plan backfired."

Achenar took the stillness as a cue to hold Yeesha as firmly as he dared.

"He's dead, love. By his own cruelty and foolishness."

She wailed.

Yeesha flinched.

Achenar did not.

No matter how much regret, no matter how much repenting, no matter how many faces he saw in his dreams, he could not erase his past familiarity with what a mother's distress at the death or torture of her offspring sounded like. Even if it was his own mother making it now.

And he refused outright to fake it. He was who he was. No faking horror he had been trained out of. No acting like he had never even dabbled in the dark.

If he was going to have contact with anyone else, he was going to do it as himself. As Achenar, grandson of Gehn the delusional and brother of Sirrus the twisted.

As Achenar great-grandson of Aitrus who was the same before men and in the dark before only his Maker.

Catherine of Riven was simply going to have to adjust and accept it.

He'd shelter Yeesha a little from the details, but he wouldn't lie. She needed the warning. She came from the same blood.

And she was fit to learn the Art in ways Achenar never could have been.

He glanced at the top of her head and wondered how long it would be before she Wrote and held out her hand over a flickering page.

"Yeesha?"

"She's shaken but she'll be fine with time. She didn't see it happen."

"I felt it happen," Yeesha whispered.

"Don't tell her that," Achenar whispered back. "She'll never stop fretting over you."

"Oh sweet Maker, the Linking Chamber..."

"Wrecked. The linking books to Haven and Spire were undamaged."

"Achenar won't know why we can't dare use the book until it's been mended."

"Yeesha... She realized she couldn't flee to safety anywhere Sirrus shouldn't know how to Link to. So she sought refuge in Haven. If Sirrus hadn't seen her do it, that probably would have worked."

"But she would have been trapped in the security chamber until she thought it was safe!"

"With the ability to signal Achenar an a transfer slot large enough for a canteen."

"You didn't trust Achenar that much when I left."

Shamed silence.

"Atrus, what happened?"

More silence.

"Atrus?"

"Sirrus Linked after her. And accidentally dropped a resonance bomb after Yeesha had already pulled the signal to Achenar."

"Oh no. What happened?"

"They fought. Sirrus knocked Achenar out, he followed when he woke up and managed to find them. It took him and our constantly helpful friend to rescue her."

"What happened to Achenar, Atrus?"

An uncomfortable pause.

"Never forget that I love you," Achenar told Yeesha to break it.

He didn't know how much she had been told.

"He... he willingly breathed poison because it was the only way to save her."

"Oh please no..."

"He was comatose for two days after he passed out, but he's lucid when he's awake. He's still too weak to move very much. It's going to take time before he can walk across a room." Atrus hugged her tightly. "And I've told him we're not deciding anything until he can."

"He's not behind some barrier?" she asked, sounding almost afraid.

Achenar wondered what she was afraid of.

Father had she believed he was at least somewhat reformed. He'd saved Yeesha's life and nearly died doing it. Surely she wasn't afraid of him.

"No barrier. No glass, no nara. No gates, no restraints." His shoulders rose and fell in a sigh. "He's just home and injured."

"Where is our son, Atrus?"

"Your side of the bed. Watching  _ that _ imager on a monitor in our bedroom."

"We are  _ so _ busted," Yeesha told him.

"It's not a bad thing to be busted for," he told her back.

"I invited them to," Atrus told Catherine. "They've both been terrified we were going to start fighting again. Achenar especially. And you'll never believe what he's done on Haven where I couldn't see."

Catherine stood, took a step back, and said something in Rivenese.

Achenar had never learned much of the language, and what he understood made very little sense.

"She's not sure it's really him," Yeesha told him in clear disbelief.

"How many other men with D'ni eyes who know about the Art are there?"

She squirmed a bit and he knew he'd accidentally found out something they weren't telling him.

At least one other person had survived the Fall and they had made contact.

His family was not completely in isolation apart from any legal or moral code devised by men.

A man who had abused access to the blessings of the Art being welcomed back into their lives was going to be a  _ problem _ .

He needed to get back into Haven as soon as he could survive it and never leave again.

He took a ragged breath and Yeesha looked at him worriedly.

"Everything's going to be fine," he tried to reassure her.

Their father was busy proving he was himself.

"No matter what happens, everything's going to be fine."

She gave him a look. "Brother..."

"We all love you. No matter what happens, we'll make sure things are okay for you."

Their mother finally seemed satisfied.

"Why didn't you believe it was me?" Atrus asked her.

"You've never been this supportive of Achenar. You'd never change your opinion of him this quickly,even if he had absolute proof he's repented and reformed. And speaking praise of something he hadn't told you..."

"He managed to build a home by blending Channelwood and Narayan techniques. And built another using an underwater foundation to prevent animals from getting in. I hadn't realized the technological limitations he was under."

"And your concerns about his mental state?"

"The primates are intelligent enough to have a simple language. They've given him a name. He's been living in the middle of a friendly troop's territory. He let it slip that first time, and then he got scared we'd find a way to move him somewhere else to protect them from him."

"Our son's friends are monkeys."

"Yes dear."

"And you trust him because?"

"You don't know what he said when he woke up at last."

"Yeesha, she's about to run here. You may want to step back before she gets here."

"No."

Atrus glanced at the imager lens, then leaned to whisper in his wife's ear.

"Yeesha, I mean that."

"And I'm staying right here."

Their mother's cry of distress was audible without the transmitter and speaker.

"What did you say?" Yeesha demanded.

"Yeesha, no."

He had barely been awake. He had meant those words only for their father.

He had never even wanted his mother to know.

"Brother, what did you say?"

"Yeesha, no." Now they were glaring at each other. "You are a child. You do not need to worry about adult problems."

"Brother..." she whined. He could hear the worry.

The last thing he wanted to do was make it any worse.

Footsteps outside.

"Yeesha, it's nothing you need to worry about. I was barely even awake..."

Movement at the glass windows and doors of the entrance, and then they had seconds before the door was open and their mother was worrying over both of them.

"We're both going to be fine," Achenar told her when he could get a word in through her tears and his own desire to simply be in her embrace for a few moments. "She's physically fine as it is."

"It's not her I'm most worried about, Achenar."

He looked at his father helplessly. "Why did you have to tell her about that?"

"Because I wasn't going to bear knowing about that alone, my son."

Yeesha focused on their father. "What did he say? Why wouldn't he tell me? Why are you  _ all _ crying?"

They shared an uncomfortable look.

"That's an adult problem you don't need to worry about yet."

Achenar resisted making a face. Barely.

Of all the things to pick up from Atrus, did that have to be the one he started using himself?

"That's what he told me," she pouted.

Atrus looked gobsmacked and mildly horrified.

Catherine looked more than slightly amused. Given her grief and distress...

_ Don't deceive yourself, _ he told himself.  _ she'd be laughing uncontrollably if Sirrus was alive. After all our animosity, to know his words came out of my mouth... and words I hated to hear myself... _

"Because this time it's true, Yeesha," Achenar told her with just enough of an edge in his voice. "I'm not going to try to keep things from you that could keep you from making big mistakes, but this isn't one of those things."

Hopefully their parents would realize the edge in his voice was meant for them. He was still against the concept in practice, and Atrus had used it far too many times after Grandmother died in cases where he had been old enough to understand.

"But..."

"But I was barely half-awake, confused, weak, and in pain, Yeesha. I might not have said what I said if any of that had been different. I wouldn't say it again now."

"Good." Catherine held him tight. "That's so good to hear."

Yeesha looked suspicious. "Then what could it be, if Father believes you now because of it  _ but _ you wouldn't say it again now?"

"Lil sis?"

"Yes?"

"You are far too smart for your own good."

"Please..."

"No." The three-part chorus was firm.

She threw up her hands and walked out, plopping down on the wooden planks of the balcony.

"Did you mean what you just said, about her being too smart?" Catherine asked worriedly.

"She's too kind to end up like we did," Achenar told her. "I wouldn't put becoming someone who tries to order everyone around her into what she believes would be the best for them past her, but that's a different kind of moral failing."

If Achenar had needed to describe his father's expression in that moment using a single word, he would have picked 'convicted'.

"It's also not one of the ones I'm particularly prone to, so I can't give advice there."

He met his father's eyes. His father looked away.

"But I do think if she ever lost control, she'd be a lot less destructive than Sirrus or I were. And she'd be correctable if she was shown the damage she was doing."

Atrus nodded.

Catherine hugged him again. "It's so good to touch you again," she told him. "I hated those bars..."

"I needed the time," he told her. "But I'm glad I can touch you again too."

She smiled. "I'm glad it all worked out for the good for at least one of you."

He tried to think of something tactful to say but couldn't.

Silence.

More silence.

Achenar realized she was expecting a response and his father was 'helpfully' supplying all the time he could possibly need to make one.

"I have a reasonable comfortable  _ independent _ life," he finally said carefully. "Pretty sure that's the end goal of parenting, although the methods were unconventional even by Grandfather's standards."

Catherine drew back with a small gasp.

Atrus was absolutely fuming.

"I repented. I reformed. I am still  _ me _ ," he told them bluntly. "Accept it, Mother: Father and I will still be griping at each other when we both have grey hair and walking canes."

Atrus visibly tried to hold in a laugh and failed.

Achenar tried not to join in. He also failed.

Catherine kept looking between them in disbelief. As if she expected either of them to completely snap and wasn't sure which of them it would be.

Yeesha turned around on the balcony to watch.

"It's good to have you home," Catherine told him once them had calmed down.

Achenar sighed.  _ Here we go. _ "Mother, this has never been my home. It's where my parents live, but it is not my home."

Sorrow in her eyes.

"We'll figure things out when he's feeling stronger," Atrus told her, clearly trying to diffuse everything hinging in the air. "Right now, that's what we need to focus on."

She took a deep breath and nodded. 

"I said a thing to Yeesha just now, and she seemed evasive." Achenar nearly regretted saying it, but he needed to know. "A joke about what other men your age with D'ni eyes and knowledge the Art exists there are. You've found other survivors, haven't you?"

Uncomfortable silence.

"I'm not asking to know where they are or how to find them. Just to know if Grandmother was right or wrong about our family being the only ones who made it."

"She was wrong,"Atrus told him. "And oddly enough, you and Sirrus were what made discovering that possible."

"Which means they know about us and what we did."

"Not in any true detail," Catherine assured him.

"They don't know I've been contacting you," Atrus admitted.

"Then there are consequences to having me here." He was as intentionally blunt as he could be. "Which means I need to go back as soon as I safely can."

"Achenar..." Now his father's voice was the one with an edge.

"I'm not having Yeesha shunned from the rest of our  _ people _ on account of me and the things I've done, Father. Not if I have a single word to say about it."

"They would have to shun Eedrah first," Atrus told him. "And they won't. Most of them were small communities that fled into Ages at the Fall and traveled far enough away to avoid the plague or had their Linking Book overlooked. After nearly a hundred years with so few others, they won't consider prison Ages anymore. Some of the guild masters were even horrified I'd used trap Books at all."

"They were caught like I was?"

"With friends, family, whoever they were with. No one alone. But they started with whatever they were carrying and whatever was already in their refuge Age," Catherine told him. "They will understand how you could be a changed person."

"And you're a limited risk since you can't Write anything yourself." Atrus was very frank and unapologetic. "All the more because you're certain you could never have learned and can never learn."

"... Atrus?"

"Please not right now," Achenar begged.

He could feel himself wearing out and his mother was already worrying over him far more than he was comfortable with.

"Reached a limit?" Atrus asked kindly.

He nodded. "Yes."

"Catherine, it can wait. I can tell you it's no damage done by what happened while you were away."

"Or by anything that happened in Haven or because I was in Haven," Achenar added.

She relaxed. It was a relief to see it.

Anything to make losing Sirrus the only thing she needed to cope with.

"Would it be too much for me to stay here with you for a while? Since I can, for now."

"At the moment, I would like nothing better," he told her slowly, deliberately.

And it was true.

Atrus negotiated until Yeesha came back and they spent the rest of the day just quietly being what was left of their family on the big bed in a pile of hugs and cuddles.

Achenar spent much of the time in a half-doze or actually asleep, exhausted by how much he had done after his mother's arrival.

How  _ little _ he had done since his mother's arrival.

It did not help that he was sleeping completely unthreatened by predators. Which was impossible on Haven.

And the dreams of the dead he had wronged had stopped since he'd breathed poison. As they sometimes did when he was ill enough. Or injured enough.

All too soon, night fell and they reluctantly broke the togetherness to make sure everyone was fed and watered.

And then they sent Yeesha off to bed, and Achenar knew there might be no more delaying.

"Achenar, is now okay?" Atrus carefully asked.

"There's no avoiding it." He looked away. "At least it's not something  _ I've _ done."

"We could step outside," Atrus offered. "You don't have to help me explain."

Catherine looked between them. "Atrus? What's going on? What are you talking about?"

"I'd rather know what the reaction was," Achenar answered sincerely. "Better than worrying about it, or wondering if anyone's just trying to make me feel better about it."

"But I wasn't you to feel better about it," Atrus murmured just loud enough to be heard.

Stillness in the air.

" _ Now _ I'm worried," his mother declared. "Atrus, what's wrong with him and why won't you two speak plainly about it?"

Achenar flinched before he could try to avoid it. Grandmother had been so careful about what she suspected, and Atrus had been so horrified that he had been extremely careful with his own words ever since Achenar had told him.

Atrus' face was now as pale as his eyes. "Catherine, our son... Achenar, he has a..."

Achenar tried not to start laughing. The irony was just so perfect.

Atrus glared ever so slightly, but it was enough to push him out of his own case of not finding the right words. "Achenar has problems producing expressive language. He can mostly compensate if given time, but since Grandmother was the only one giving him that..." After a pause, he continued. "Without that, he picks the wrong words and says things he didn't mean to say. When we first made contact again, he'd had over a decade to decompensate since there was no one around to care. I've read things he wrote there, while he was giving himself time, and the difference between how he writes and speaks is striking."

"But he picked up... The language in Channelwood was more forgiving in practice, wasn't it?"

"They also knew I wasn't talking in my first language," Achenar commented. "Father made presumptions."

"I talk as I think. I thought he was the same." Atrus looked away. "The Art is dependent on expressive language. Even if Achenar had mastered an understanding of how stable Ages fit together, he never could have Written one."

Catherine said something in Rivenese that Achenar was fairly sure included a number of words Yeesha was too young to be taught.

They both waited respectfully for her to finish.

"The fighting between you --  _ all _ of the fighting between you -- was based in insisting Achenar manage his emotions by  _ talking _ through them, and now you tell me our son never could have met your standards."

Atrus sheepishly raised a hand to the back of his neck.

"Mother, I don't have a birthmark proclaiming I was Made wrong."

"You were not Made wrong!" they both snapped in unison.

"Not what I meant. I meant there was nothing to tell you that you couldn't miss."

His mother hugged him. "We know now." Then, "Oh! Is this why we're waiting to discuss what happens next?"

"No, I'd promised that before I knew," Atrus told her. "There are so many factors involved."

"How much of a say do I get?" Achenar asked carefully.

"Achenar," Catherine began.

"It matters," he ground out.

"I can't see how I could block you from Haven," Atrus interrupted. "If that's something you're still worried about. And I do have to admit, if you did that study of the mangree language, I'd be interested in reading it."

"Atrus, we can't send him away again..."

"I'm an adult and I'd be walking away on my own," Achenar told her. "And the linking cage on Haven is broken. No more bars."

She didn't look convinced. He hadn't really hoped she would be.

"And if we didn't prevent if here, he could still come visit," Atrus told her. "I'm in and out of other Ages all the time. He'd be in just one, but it could feel the same otherwise."

"Atrus..."

"Mother, I'm not going anywhere right now. That's why we said no decisions until I can walk across a room. Even then, I won't be fit to come back to Haven yet."

She hugged him to her harder.

 


	4. Chapter 4

Achenar waited a day before he risked disturbing anyone again.

Ideally, he would have given Catherine months to mourn Sirrus without any other care, but they didn't have months.

And Yeesha had convenient gardening chores.

And Catherine was supervising.

And Atrus couldn't leave him completely alone for long until he could walk. Which meant he could ask.

"Why did you say Sirrus's and my actions led you to find the other survivors?" he asked bluntly.

"We had to trap Gehn to free your mother," Atrus told him just as bluntly. "After that, it was safe to break out of the single chamber in K'veer and go exploriing."

"Grandfather was trapped? Is trapped?"

"Was, is my guess. My friend, who you've met, said he had a harpoon gun and a few rounds with him. He wouldn't have needed a gun or a knife to have survived there, but knowing how much he ordered other people around..."

"No chance he had a Linking Book on him?"

"If he did, it would have been to his own private Age or Riven. Riven ripped itself apart and there was no Linking Book out left behind. Even if he escaped, there would be no way for our paths to meet again."

"He did always want to be in a place where everyone thought he was a god," Achenar mused. "He probably broke quickly."

"I'll defer to your experience, but that was my thought as well."

There was a long silence.

"I'm going to be a problem for you with the other survivors, aren't I?" Achenar finally asked. "They'll understand what my known offenses were... and have halfway accurate guesses about what was hidden when those Books were destroyed."

"There may be," Atrus admitted.

"All right. I'm not going to have my survival hurt Yeesha by harming her chances with everyone else who knows about the Art."

"What?"

"We need to keep my presence quiet and then I need to disappear back into Haven. She's not told them she was talking to me if they haven't figured out you'd made contact, so it's doable."

"Achenar..." Just the slightest edge entered Atrus' voice. "We've discussed this..."

"It would be different if it were just you and mother, but Yeesha's only a child. She wasn't even born yet. And she's never known a world where there were no others."

"It's not going to be that bad."

"But Grandmother said..."

"The entire Guild of Writers is  _ dead _ , Achenar. The entire Guild of Linguists is  _ dead _ . All of the great masters of the guilds are  _ dead _ . All of the Lords of D'ni are  _ dead _ . Under five thousand lived out of a population of over a million, and many of them because they were below notice. Most of the 'survivors' were like me -- born after the Fall. I'm the only halfway experienced active Writer we have, and the entire religion shifted because most communities didn't have priests, priestesses, or religious texts beyond what individual people remembered."

"And they won't turn against the family of their one Writer."

"Not when the problem was that our family was figuring things out as we bumbled along, they won't."

Achenar relaxed.

Then a thought struck him. "Some of the priests and priestesses  _ did _ survive, then."

Atrus nodded. "And at least two copies of the more essential holy texts. And one of many others -- someone's private retreat ended up a refugee site, and he had his private library there. We also have about fifty copies of  _ Words _ , because it was involved in a religious revival the few decades before the Fall."

Achenar smirked. "Grandmother used to talk about that, and the sort of people who lived their lives clinging to prophecy."

"She had never read it," Atrus said quietly.

"The opinion holds."

"A lot of the prophecies in  _ Words _ are about the Fall, my son." Atrus seemed genuinely disturbed. "She's in it.  _ I'm _ in it."

Now it was Achenar's turn to be confused. "What?"

Atrus nodded. "Along with warnings about prophecies that only make sense in hindsight. Honestly, I've been trying to ignore a great deal of it other than a few promises that our people will know the Maker's peace eventually and not be as twisted as we were before the Fall."

"From what Grandmother said, that last bit shouldn't be hard."

"The problem lies in not slipping back once we feel power again and that's why you don't want access to Linking Books, isn't it? It's in case you start regressing."

"Yes," he reluctantly admitted. "Haven and access to family is enough for me now."

"Would you still think that way if Yeesha left for the survivor colony?"

"This house isn't part of it?"

Atrus shook his head. "I grew up in isolation. I don't feel comfortable in large groups."

"So you wrote a private Age."

Atrus smiled and shook his head. "There's nothing private about the Age, only about the location. This is our home Age. Welcome to Earth, Achenar."

Achenar stared at him. "Granddmother's Earth? With the Dippers and the Hunter with his Belt and the Cleft and D'ni under the ground?"

"Under our feet a few miles, if I've done the math right." He grinned. "And if my Grandfather Aitrus wrote the right figures on his map, which I've found no reason yet to doubt."

"We're on Earth.  _ I'm _ on Earth." He stared. "Grandmother said... the population... you're trusting me here."

"The Linking Book we left on Haven leads here," Atrus reminded him. "Not through some second Age."

"You'd trust me in an Age with that many people in it."

"The desert is uninhabited for miles. Even if Sirrus had tried to leave here instead of traveling to Serenia, there would have been nowhere really to go. We have a railcar that goes to a point much closer to the nearest town of the native civilization, but there's still a walk and anyone who doesn't know the way will get lost."

"And the D'ni thought this area was vulnerable to invasion?"

"Horribly vulnerable."

"That water has to go somewhere."

"It's called a seep. The water disappears underground again a few miles from here, gets filtered through bedrock, and becomes part of the water supply for D'ni."

"And they didn't see  _ that _ as a security risk?" It was nearly unbelievable. "Sirrus would have taken over in a month."

"They had Writers and Ages. Stopping the seep up completely would have only had them Writing an Age with abundant freshwater and raiding it one bucket at a time."

Achenar sighed. "It's been long enough I've forgotten Ages can provide resources like that. And it seems foolish to depend that much on access to them."

"Good." Atrus' voice was grim. "They were so dependent that there was nearly no food production inside the cavern."

He stared. "They were dependent on other Ages for their daily bread. Is that better or worse than us just being after power, wealth, and other pleasures?"

"I think you would need to talk to one of the priests about that," Atrus told him carefully. "I've been lucky enough to not need to research that question. Either way, it's an exploitation of the Maker's gift of the Art."

"Do you think any of them would be willing to talk with me if they knew I was here?"

Atrus looked at him, face nearly unreadable. "You would want to talk to a priest?"

"How many years on Haven with nothing to keep me company at night but my shame, my guilt, and the faces of the people whose lives I wrecked haunting me in my dreams?"

Atrus took a deep breath. "You need to talk to a priest."

"Only if they're going to know there's contact. Only if they know I'm not trapped on Haven." He met Atrus' eyes. "Only if it's not going to hurt Yeesha."

"I know one who wouldn't say anything."

Achenar nodded. "I'll think about it."

Atrus seemed very uncomfortable.

"I'm not going to hide things just to make you feel better," Achenar told him. "Or mother. And Yeesha needs to know enough to have a warning."

Atrus nodded. "You need to be you."

"I need to be me."

Uncomfortable silence.

"I'm also not going to keep silent about where I think Sirrus has gone."

Atrus flinched hard.

"Father, if anyone goes there... you know what his last act was."

"I wish I didn't."

"I wish Yeesha didn't." He shifted around a bit. "She shouldn't be having to think about all this. Not this young. Not about him, not about me."

Atrus flinched worse.

He stayed silent though, as if he was just going to let Achenar keep talking and providing the space for it.

"I don't think I'll know how I'll be judged until it's time for it to happen," he told his father flatly. "I've accepted that."

More silence.

"You need to talk to a priest."

"If it doesn't risk harming Yeesha."

Atrus smiled grimly. "To think I was worried about letting you have any contact with her, even supervised."

Achenar smiled back. "You should have been cautious. You couldn't be sure I'd changed with the information you had then."

"You're a good big brother," Atrus told him. "Yeesha knows that too. She wouldn't have run to you for help otherwise."

"She trusted Sirrus until he attacked her."

"Sirrus had the language skills to be that deceptive that easily. You don't."

"I'm not sure if I feel insulted or complimented."

Atrus chuckled and sat in the chair next to the bed. "You display your emotions openly. You have and have always had problems expressing them properly. This means everyone near you knows when you're angry or irritated. You didn't even try to hide being happy to see us the first time we let you know we'd come to Haven. She knows what you think of her, and she knew even before what happened on Serenia."

Achenar looked away.

"She'll know you don't mean anything to have a bad effect on her. I do think she'll take it badly if you avoid anything that might hurt her but would help you."

After a moment, he nodded in agreement. "I'd rather she was old enough to take that risk for me herself."

"Fifteen years before she's old enough according to the D'ni." Atrus waited until Achenar looked up at him. "That's longer than you had no outside contact on Haven."

"I know." He sighed.

"That priest has a daughter a bit older than Yeesha. They're friends. It may help you both if that family knows what's going on."

"Define what you mean by 'a bit'."

"Past the age of maturity herself, training to be a priestess, and chafing at not being old enough to officially give advice." Atrus shook his head. "Old enough to understand tact and a need for silence. Honestly, she's stopped just short of suggesting  _ I  _ needed to repent for using trap Books at least five times now. Vahtah's going to be a headache when she gets older."

"Or she'll be a loud voice calling out truth to those who won't hear it otherwise," Achenar mused carefully. "I could have used one of those when Sirrus started leading me astray."

"A natural-born prophetess?"

Achenar shrugged. "They happen sometimes. If  _ Words _ is accurate, why not those stories?"


	5. Chapter 5

Yeesha kept him company while their parents were shamelessly using making dinner as an excuse for childfree time to talk.

"Vahtah and her father are both nice," she reported. "At least, I like them. And they've never been weird about our family."

"What kind of weird aren't they?" he asked.

She playfully made a face at his awkward grammar. "Well some people are weird about who Father is. D'ni status of anyone who could Write, I guess. Some of it is what they know about you and Sirrus. And Sirrus probably just made that twenty-five times worse!"

"He probably did."

"And then there are the ones who are still sometimes acting weird about Great-Grandmother."

"She said the people of D'ni didn't like her marriage much. She said they nearly let Gehn die in infancy."

Yeesha was quiet and still. "Some of them blame her for the Fall. Because she pushed Veovis over the edge. Because she pled for clemency when no mercy should have been offered."

"That's wrong. She didn't do any of that, they did. A'geris and Veovis were grown men. A'geris caused the Fall and Veovis helped him."

" _ Words _ calls her The Destroyer," Yeesha practically whispered.

"Her Maker called her The Destroyer before her grandparents were even born. Her. Grandmother."

Yeesha nodded. "But  _ Words _ says it was necessary. Or that's what Father says. I can't read D'ni yet, and he refuses to translate it."

"Prophecy depends on precise wording, Yeesha. Translation loses things. Mother curses in Rivenese for a reason. English and D'ni just don't have the depth of vulgarity. Or so Grandmother told me."

"I wish I could have known her," Yeesha mused. "I have so many questions."

"I'm sure she made it to the Perfect Age. Maybe you'll get to ask her."

It seemed impossible that the kind old woman who'd given him the time he needed to put his words together could have gone anywhere else. If the Maker rejected her at her judgment, then there seemed to be little hope for anyone else.

Uncomfortable silence.

Yeesha squirmed on the chair uncomfortably.

"What is it?"

She looked down at her feet.

"Yeesh, I know it was something I said."

She sighed. "Where are you going?"

He knew he wasn't talking about Haven or the D'ni colony.

"Yeesh, you don't need to worry about that."

"How can I now worry about that?"

"Because you are a child who needs to be more concerned with her own soul than she is about her brother's."

"I know where Sirrus went," she told him after a moment.

He didn't want to ask how certain she was of her evidence. "I think everyone who knows what his last act was knows where Sirrus went, Yeesh. I don't think anything could balance that out in the eyes of the Maker. And he had been doing too many bad things for far too long."

"So had you, before you got trapped," she weakly insisted.

"So had I," he confirmed. "And that's why I don't know if all the good I can do with the rest of my life will balance things out for me. I want you taking care you don't end up like me."

She met his gaze and her eyes were full of tears. "Achenar..."

"I'm not lying to make you feel better," he told her. "This is part of why Father wants to get a priest here to talk with me. But I wouldn't want lying to you about this to put you at risk of making some of my mistakes. There are things a person can't undo. There are things a person can't take back. And sometimes there are no second chances. I never want you to need one."

She nodded, as serious as he'd ever seen her.

He reached out to hold her hand and a moment later she was on the edge of the bed ad hugging him.

He hugged her back.

"I love you, Achenar."

"I love you too, Yeesh."

"What happens if..."

"Then the time we have is the time we have. So if I stay more involved than you'd like as you get older, that's why."

She was crying into his shoulder and he started crooning to her the same way he did at fussy baby mangrees.

They were still like that when their father coughed from the door. Their mother was with him and dinner was clearly ready and delivered.

He tried to pry Yeesha loose but he wasn't strong enough yet. "Help?"

Atrus gently encouraged her to let go. "What's got you so worked up, my little desert bird?"

"She asked the same thing we were discussing this morning," Achenar hedged. "I didn't lie, we both got emotional, she got clingy."

"You didn't get emotional," she claimed as Atrus hugged her.

"Not the same way as when I get angry," he admitted to her. "But still emotional."

Catherine looked worried and confused. She put the food down on a side table. "What did she ask?"

Everyone else looked down at the nearest available patch of ground.

"Atrus?"

He didn't answer. He'd probably be paying for that in their next argument, but Achenar knew his father honestly didn't deserve to be dealing with everything he was dealing with.

"Achenar?"

"It was the Where Am I Going? Question," Achenar carefully told her.

"I thought everything was waiting until he could..."

"Not that Where Is He Going? Question, my love."

Her face paled. "Achenar..."

"I've been doing what I could to shift the balance in my favor. And I plan to keep doing what I can. It's just there's no guarantee that will be enough."

That was when she took Yeesha's place.

"At least the food is meant to be served room temperature," Atrus mouthed at him the next time their eyes met.

* * *

 

After dinner, Achenar and Yeesha had a moment alone again.

"I'll pray for you," Yeesha told him plainly.

"I'd hope a brother who can't sit up in bed yet would be worthy of your prayers."

"That's not what I meant."

"Then what did you meant?"

"I meant I'll pray for the Maker to be kind when the time comes. Even if I have to pray it every night until it's past doing any good."

"I don't know if that will do any good, Yeesha. But knowing you're trying that will make me feel better. Just one thing."

"What?"

"Don't let Mother know you're doing it."

 


	6. Chapter 6

"Now, this is the language the mangree use in groups," he carefully explained to Yeesha. "I'm not sure if the chattering they do at other times is a second one. I don't have enough examples and it's far too fast for me to follow. I'd have no hope of imitating it if it was."

"Which means it may not be able to convey all they talk about," Yeesha reasoned.

"And I only have the conversations I've witnessed. There are places I don't have access to. I'm sure there are things I simply don't hear."

Yeesha nodded. "I understand. So this is the lower limit of their communication. It could be much more advanced and you just don't know yet."

"Right. Now, basically everything is based on three tones and two tone lengths. Each tone is a syllable."

He could finally sit up in bed and they were celebrating by sneaking a language lesson behind their father's back.

"So that's just six phonemes in the entire language. That's not much."

"They aren't advanced enough to produce much more." He thought a moment. "Our vocal cords are part of why we have so many possible syllables. Our languages don't even use all of them. The D'ni named Grandmother Ti'ana because Anna broke some of their rules about sounds."

"And Father redubbed Mother Catherine because Katran doesn't sound right in English  _ and _ it was almost the same name anyway."

"Exactly. Now, I haven't tried speaking it myself. I think languages for those without advanced vocal cords may not work right for those with. On Haven, I've got systems put together that can make the sounds. But I have come up with a way to write it."

He had never been so happy to have a slate in his hands.

He drew out his method of marking down mangree sounds.

Yeesha looked at it thoughtfully. "So those are the tones, that's movement through time, and the width of the mark is the length?"

"Yes."

She tilted her head. "I think I could adapt D'ni numerals to this."

"You have to be joking."

"I'm not, honest. The rotation for the fives could mean length, it's already an intensifier..."

He stared at her, trying to understand.

"You can't read D'ni," she realized out loud. The look on her face was almost heartbreaking. "You don't know what I'm talking about."

"No, I don't"

"So, D'ni uses base 25, only the numerals function on base 5. It's less complicated than it sounds."

"I'm already lost."

"English, one and zero is ten?"

"Yes..."

"D'ni, one and zero is twenty-five. But one rotated is five. One rotated on top of one is six. So if you had three symbols for the tones, but rotated them for the longer form, you'd have symbols as compact as English letters or D'ni numerals instead of that."

He tried to think through it. "You may have to show me," he warned her.

She wiped off the slate and quickly sketched out a grid of 25 symbols in boxes with English numbers beside the columns and rows. "See, the ones and fives."

"Your idea may be crazy enough to work. And that would save a lot of space when I start writing research journals." Or anything he didn't want read easily.

His father reading his old journals may have worked out for the best, but that didn't mean he wanted every scrap he wrote even that public.

"It'd work for writing words too, see? This is how to write fifty in D'ni. And here next to it is seven hundred. Which I know because it was the first thing Father taught me to write that needed three digits."

"Bars connect a single number, a space restarts the format... I'd want to use different marks inside, though."

Yeesha grinned. "But then you couldn't play with the numbers as a cipher."

"My sweet innocent baby sister is playing with ciphers?"

She gave him alook. "If you used D'ni numerals, you could change the D'ni number into English. It'd take knowing D'ni numbers  _ and _ mangree to get anything out of it. Oh and then you could use the D'ni equivalents to the English numerals to make it even harder to crack."

"Yeesha, you'd better be glad you are too young to be a credible bad influence."

"Well, there are times when it's good to have signals no one else can decipher. Ti'ana was told by Aitrus that the Book went to a Death Age, but A'geris didn't know enough about Earth natives to understand."

"And there are some who still have issues with our family because of her."

"I wish the Maker hadn't called her that."

"She  _ did _ become the sign of their destruction."

"I know, but... it's just wrong."

"Even if it's the Maker who said it? Even if she never cared because she never knew? Even if she wanted it taken to the foundations after dealing with their bigotries?"

She was silent for a long time.

"You may be right," he allowed. "Something only our family knows might be a good idea."

* * *

They were still introducing Achenar to numerals when Atrus came in to see if they were okay.

He stared a moment.

"We're busted," Achenar told Yeesha.

"It's just numbers," she blurted out. "Even Sirrus couldn't do anything with numbers."

"I'd hoped to..." Atrus stammered out.

Achenar smirked at him. "There is another chair. I will admit to a nefarious plot in this: she was suggesting a better way for me to write the sound phonemes in mangree calls, but she used D'ni numerals as the example of what she meant."

Atrus thought a moment. "Don't to anything until I come back with paper and graphite. We need more than a homework slate for this."

Yeesha grinned at him.

Achenar was puzzling his way through higher-order conversions -- Yeesha was right about the usefulness as ciphers -- when Atrus told them, "M'rekooahn and Vahtah are coming tomorrow. They don't know about you yet, Achenar. Just that something happened and my family needs their attention for a few hours."

"Father..."

"I'll explain everything when they get here."

"You do realize you'll pull this trick one too many times some day and have someone feel intentionally betrayed, right?" Achenar asked him. "Because this tops nearly everything else you've ever pulled."

"I didn't want to take the risk of telling them there. This is my problem to work out."

Achenar stared. "And the rest of our lives caught up in it."

" _ Words _ calls him The Burdened One," Yeesha told him in her best false-helpful voice.

Thank the Maker Sirrus hadn't  _ tried _ to be a bad influence on her.

"I can see that," Achenar told her. "It really does fit."

"Kids..."

"You have to trust somebody outside the family sometime," Achenar told him. "And if you're bringing them here anyway, shouldn't you have been honest before they agreed to Link here?"

Atrus looked away.

"And the priest thinks he's going to have some semi-normal problem to deal with. Not me myself. Not you even having a chance to know Sirrus is gone. Not what just happened to Yeesha. The sort of problem he regularly deals with."

"I'm not sure I'd even be able to describe what you need," he admitted.

"That's his job," he said with a sigh. "He'd come in knowing if there was anything he needed to bring."

"There shouldn't be."

"Father, you  _ know _ how spotty my religious education was. He may have to start with basics." He quite intentionally gave his father a sly look. "He may even sit right there, hold his face in his hands, and beg the Maker for strength."


	7. Chapter 7

The man had D'ni eyes, sandy brown hair, and the look of a man who had just been struck across the back of the head with a tree limb. Twice.

"Hello," Achenar greeted him.

The man staggered over to the chair, put his hands over his face, and muttered something in D'ni.

He held in all sign of amusement. The priest wouldn't have a clue about the comment yesterday and he deserved better than the situation he was involved in.

"I am completely unprepared for this," the priest finally admitted.

"I would have preferred you to find out what was going on before you Linked here," Achenar told him.

"I don't think the warning would have helped very much. We never needed education in how to counsel someone who had lived in a Prison Age, and very little on talking to someone who had just been sentenced to one."

"I understand. Honestly, I'm not going to be surprised if I'm beyond hope in the Maker's sight."

"That... depends."

Achenar stared at him. "Depends on what?"

"Which theological framework is correct. D'ni belief in the Maker had multiple strains. The Watcher's group only became dominant at the moment because  _ Words _ accurately predicted the Fall."

"What did they think about the formerly immoral like me?"

"The groups who stressed obedience to the Maker's laws would primarily consider you hopeless before the judgment and the exceptions would require an isolated life of prayer."

Achenar sighed. "Those are out, then. Even when I was completely alone, I wasn't praying that much." He thought of the prayers he said in the night about the faces in his dreams. There was no way they were enough. Maybe they didn't even count since they took nothing from his daily life. "I pray, but I wouldn't call myself a religious hermit."

"And that's based on what I know you did. Not the things you hid."

"Not the things that have happened on Haven, either."

The priest stared at him.

"Before I reformed. It was an accident in a moral sense, anyway. It wouldn't have happened if I had known."

"What wouldn't have happened?"

"Father didn't realize how intelligent the primates were. And I didn't either. Mother doesn't know what happened, and I'd prefer she and Yeesha never find out."

"What happened?"

"Lookout surprised me. There were predators in that part of the jungle big enough to see me as prey. I killed."

"Understandable."

"I was surviving from hunting at that point."

The mutual horror hung in the air.

"I left them alone after I repented. There was another troop that hadn't met me. I've been living among them. They've Named me."

There was a long uneasy silence.

"Okay, I can tell you right now that my forebears never dreamed of counseling someone through the aftermath of  _ that _ . And if I were you I'd start praying that the groups that thought rule-following was required were wrong. I don't think any of them thought a path back from  _ that _ was possible."

"What about the others?"

"The others stressed one's overall relationship with Yahvo, so past transgressions are less, well, damning. Which again would mean a lot of praying, but not in trying to counter the past. And also without trying to get into the Perfect Age as the primary goal. Given certain things, I'd almost advise you to look into the Watcher's  _ Words _ . But I don't think I should."

"Why not?"

M'rekooahn looked away. "Your family is in it."

"I know my beloved great-grandmother is referred to as The Destroyer."

"That's not it."

"Then what is it?"

"All those years ago, the Maker told everyone that they shouldn't trust the sons of the Burdened One. As examples of how not to live."

"I need a minute to put words together."

"Take all the time you need."

Achenar nodded.

It wasn't quite as big a shock as the day he got a second name, but it was close.

The Maker had known before he was Made that he would turn out wrong. Not the details, not the precise choices, but he had known Achenar would be a shame to him.

'Relationship with Yahvo'? If that was the starting point, how could there be a relationship? He'd been doomed before Aitrus was even born!

"How does someone have a relationship with someone else who'd said that about them before they were born?"

"That would be the conundrum."

"I don't trust myself, but..." He let it trail off.

"But it's different if it's the Maker saying it."

Achenar nodded.

"If none of the rest of us survived and you were completely free to make your own decisions about your future, what would you do?" he asked seriously.

"Go back to Haven. I want to do a study of their language. Who knows, it might prevent that oversight from happening again. If I learn enough to apologize to the troop I decimated, I want to. No matter the consequences. They ought to know what happened, that they're safe now." He'd taken it slow, but he paused before continuing anyway. "I want to help Yeesha not make my kind of mistake. I want to be a good brother."

"I'd say you've proved yourself an excellent brother."

"And then I'd just try to enjoy simple things as much as I can in the time I've got."

The priest looked perplexed.

"In case the rest isn't enough," he explained. "If all I'm ever going to get of the beauty the Maker's Made is this life and none after..."

He smiled. "Then you need to experience as much of it as you can now."

Achenar nodded.

"The thing is,  _ Words _ doesn't speak even half as badly of you as it does of your grandfather Gehn. Or of my own generation of D'ni."

He didn't understand.

"And you are never referred to individually. The statement was against you and your brother as a set."

"I... I don't understand."

"The Maker may have known you would be corrupted. He may have also known you'd break loose of it if left alone afterwards. The warning's only about exploiting Ages for pleasures, not anything more specific."

"I can't read D'ni, so I'll have to take your word for that."

"Atrus warned me you barely speak it. Luckily for you, Catherine's past means most of us know a lot of English."

He thought for a while. "So the Maker may have known I'd end up reforming and not made any effort to reject  _ that _ before it happened."

The priest nodded. "I'd say you've got some hope. And if there's no hope for you, Eedrah's in trouble."

Some day, he was going to have to find out who Eedrah was.

"I will go researching when I go home. There may be something I just haven't had reason to read yet."

"Can I ask one more thing?"

"Achenar, you can ask many things. What is it?"

"Was there a D'ni prayer -- a prewritten one, something I can memorize -- for someone you'd killed? I keep seeing their faces at night. I wake, pray, and go back to sleep, but my education was so limited..."

"Not particularly." The lines on his forehead got deeper. "Is this harming your ability to recover now?"

"No. They stop when I'm sick or injured, and then they start again."

M'rekooahn paled. "They stop when losing the sleep would bring you to harm, and only then. And when losing sleep would no longer bring you to harm, they come back?"

"Yes."

He thought quite seriously for a moment, face hard but eyes full of wonder. "Don't worry," he finally told Achenar. "I think the Maker has the situation in his own capable hands."

"...What?"

"As you said, you get breaks from that work when it would bring you to harm. I doubt you'd allow yourself that."

"I wouldn't," he admitted.

"Well then, that much is clear. And if Yahvo is reaching out like that, then I can't see him rejecting you reaching back to him. It won't be easy or comfortable, but I'd say right now there's no denying you've got a chance."

Achenar breathed a huge sigh of relief.

"And now I'm intrigued by these primate neighbors of yours, if you don't mind talking more. Or whenever I come back. It's clear you need more of a religious education than you've gotten."

"I'd be grateful." He thought a moment.

"If you are too tired, I wouldn't blame you. Processing all this would be exhausting for anyone."

"It's not..." He felt himself blush. "I have a language problem I was Made with."

The priest blanched slightly. "You could have told me."

"I just need more time to put the right words together. My parents didn't even realize it was there."

"Then this has been more trying for you than I thought."

"Not that trying."

"Nonsense. You've been trained to think of this as the price of any communication. Well, if Yahvo's giving you time off for the sake of your health, then I'm going to give you an easier time as well. It's not anything that won't keep a good number of days."

Achenar felt awkward again. He likely said 'a good number of days' because he thought Achenar couldn't understand D'ni units of time.

He was absolutely right.

Catherine had ended up being opposed to a lot of D'ni things when Achenar was growing up because Gehn had forced so much of his twisted idea of D'ni culture onto the people of Riven, Ti'ana was natively not D'ni, and Atrus had picked up D'ni as an early but second language. Achenar hadn't been exposed to much of anything from D'ni that wasn't tied to Atrus' hopes his sons would one day learn the Art. Which meant in practice nearly nothing.

M'rekooahn seemed to catch something was up. "Your cultural knowledge is as spotty as your religious education, isn't it?"

"Unfortunately," Achenar admitted.

"No shame to you for being isolated and uninformed that way. That was Atrus' responsibility."

"Doesn't matter whose responsibility it was. Besides, days on Haven were different. My time sense is different. Not by much. Enough."

"Vahtah may be better at dealing with that than I am. She's already been giving Yeesha cultural information. And you two aren't all that different in age, even if you are older."

"That might make it worse."

"She knows your family was isolated from every other survivor. Ti'ana wasn't raised one of us. There's no shame in an ignorance you were never offered an education to fill."

"She may not want to be anywhere near me."

"She is Yeesha's friend. She's going to be horrified Yeesha was navigating relationships with imprisoned brothers without telling her."

"I wish Yeesha didn't have to deal with any of this."

"That's not the world she was born into. Honestly, she's done remarkably well. Even with all her questions, I never guessed she was in contact with either of you."

There were voices outside and drawing nearer.

"Well," the priest said, "sounds like someone decided I'd had enough time to tell you how much trouble you're in with your Maker."

"Or Yeesha got worried." She was clinging too much.

"Or Vahtah got curious." He was smiling. "Wouldn't surprise me if she started looking for an excuse. She's been strange from the start, and she's training to be a priestess herself."

"Hopefully she never has to deal with someone like me."

"I think she'd prefer that to leaving someone like you floundering alone with the spiritual aftermath."

And then Yeesha was at the door and the woman with her had M'rekooahn's sandy hair and D'ni eyes.

She  _ was _ visibly closer to his age than to Yeesha's.

Achenar suddenly felt very shy.

He'd never had to deal with a  _ peer _ , unless Sirrus counted. Not someone his own generation and aware of the Art the way they were. The natives of other Ages didn't count, not really. Not the same way.

And he'd never met a female descendant of D'ni older than Yeesha at all.

She seemed as awkward as he felt. "Shorah," she stammered.

Wonderful. D'ni. D'ni he'd long forgotten if he'd ever been taught.

Maybe he should go back to Haven and become a religious hermit... He could feel his cheeks burning with shame.

"You don't even know that much?" M'rekooahn asked him.

"It's been years, okay?" Achenar regretted the outburst the moment it happened. "And I've lost a lot of the D'ni I did know from not having any reason at all to use it for a decade. I never knew enough for it to count as a second language, and I'm so completely illiterate in it that Yeesha was teaching me basic numerals yesterday."

Vahtah paled.

Achenar wanted to flee down into the D'ni cavern and bury himself in the foundations of some long-abandoned building where no one would ever find him and his shame again.

He had to settle for burying his face in his hands.

"Shorah's a greeting," Vahtah told him in a patient voice. "It means 'peace'."

He kept his face hidden.

"Achenar has an outburst problem," Yeesha whispered a little too loudly.

They were going to think he hadn't reformed.  _ She _ was going to think he hadn't reformed.

The things he had done had so little to do with the outbursts... He wasn't dangerous when he was yelling, he was dangerous when he wanted to make something pay because it had twisted around inside. Or because the anger made a handy excuse.

He was dangerous when he stopped yelling, not when he was letting it all out.

He felt himself start crying and didn't even try to hold it in. It hadn't mattered on Haven, they already knew he was distressed, and if they were going to judge him it would be for bodies in the ground instead of water on his face.

"It's just what people say," Vahtah told him after a moment. "I didn't think about what you never having contact with any other survivors would mean. Yeesha was born the year after. She's always had us a Linking Book away.

_ 'Yeesha was born the year after.' _

He nodded so she'd see he'd heard her.

He didn't uncover his face.

"Achenar, it's all right. Honestly, it is. You've been isolated for so long it's a marvel you're functional.  _ And _ you're injured."

He took a few deep breaths.

Then he looked out between his fingers.

They were all looking at him with actual concern.

He didn't know how to handle that now.

"Achenar?" Yeesha asked.

He sighed. "I'm exhausted and embarrassed," he admitted, "but I'll be fine. Don't worry about it, Lil Sis."

She hugged him and he had to take his hands away to hug her back.

There was nothing but compassion in Vahtah's eyes. "Yeesha and I talked," she explained. "I believe you really have changed. So until I see evidence otherwise..."

Achenar swallowed hard and nodded.

Vahtah gasped. "We're the first full-blooded D'ni you've ever met, aren't we?"

"What of it?" he growled.

"I didn't mean it that way," she stammered very fast. "Just that you haven't met anyone who wasn't from somewhere else as well as D'ni."

"No, I hadn't." He looked away again.

"I told you they were okay," Yeesha reminded him.

He nodded and kissed her forehead.

"Overwhelmed?" M'rekooahn offered.

Achenar nodded. "I've got a lot to think about."

"Of course. We should be back in a few days, or at least I will be once I do some research."

"Atrus asked me to come back with you. Yeesha needs someone besides family right now, and until he decides what he's going to finally admit to everyone..."

Achenar started laughing. "You... you think he's bad about that now?"

M'rekooahn and Vahtah looked at him.

"Why do you think I don't know any D'ni? Why do you think I am completely illiterate in D'ni?" He took a few deep breaths and tried to calm down. "It's a good thing I actually want to go back to Haven. The mangrees don't care if I write in English. The second I ever try to join the colony of survivors, I'm the illiterate son of a  _ Writer _ ."

Yeesha hugged him tighter.

"Luckily for you, D'ni spells as it sounds," Vahtah told him. "Illiterate isn't going to be the hard part, becoming fluent is. And since I've already helped my nieces and nephews learn their letters, I'm not inexperienced in providing basic education," Vahtah told him. "Might even be nice, teaching someone who is already past functional in another system."

Achenar felt uneasy.

"The Art uses a different character set," M'rekooahn told him. "One no one could derive out from standard D'ni script. And it requires access to the right kind of paper and the right kind of ink. Casual education isn't a threat and Atrus would have no end of trouble if he tried to stop you from learning and I heard of it."

"But..."

"Achenar, can you trust me on this? I know what the laws of D'ni were and how they were applied. I think you'll be surprised how much of a chance the rest of us give you."

He didn't know how much he wanted to trust that.

The priest sighed. "D'ni history, then. The bits Yeesha's not old enough for."

Achenar quickly agreed to that.

Atrus stuck his head around the doorway. "Everything going well, or do I need to rescue my son?"

The sound of M'rekooahn's teeth grinding was audible from five feet away.

Atrus took a step back.

Atrus actually took a step back.

"He needs remedial education. In  _ anything _ connected to his D'ni heritage. And we will be handling that."

Achenar had never seen his father quite this off-balance before, and it was disturbing and satisfying all at once.

"And at the very least the rest of whoever was involved in setting up contact with him needs to hear about what's happened. Achenar needs more contact with other people, and you need to stop hiding things from people who should know."

Atrus didn't resist.

"He's making decisions based on assuming he'll be rejected by the entire community. He needs to know whether or not that's actually likely."

Atrus nodded.

"And he needs to read  _ Words _ . I've already told him what it says about him."

Atrus flinched.

"So you aren't saving him from anything if he can't read or overhear D'ni."

The men drifted outside, the list of needs and demands growing.

"I don't want to be this much trouble..." he stammered to Vahtah.

"It gives him something to do. It's his job and I'm the last child at home."

"The one he didn't expect," Yeesha chimed in.

Vahtah smiled at her. "Yes, the one he didn't expect."

Achenar felt confused.

"Mother thought she was entering menopause late, and I showed up first," Vahtah told him with a laugh. "Properly spaced, and she  _ still _ ended up with a fifth child, and born after she reached the age of wisdom."

_ She's not training to be a priestess. She's a prophetess, _ Achenar realized.

 


	8. Chapter 8

Achenar needed a few more days of healing before he was fit to so much as walk across the room without his mother fretting over him.

It was unnerving, to say the least, after so long on his own when injured.

A prison Age meant you were on your own if you got hurt or sick. It also meant you never had to manage other people's reactions when you were hurt or sick. The mangrees would act concerned, but they didn't hover.

Katran of Riven? Atrus was less observant of new experiments.

In any case, he had been in the Age of Earth for fifteen days (and could write the number in D'ni without consulting a chart) when he was finally judged fit to leave the room.

It was the longest he had been without access to fresh air and direct sunlight since before Haven. Probably a trip to Rime, given the monstrous storms the Age had, or a childhood illness that kept him inside. He couldn't remember, he just knew it had to have happened before.

On Haven, there had been no avoiding either for long. Anywhere without access to a breeze got stuffy in the heat, and the alternative to sunlight was the hurricanes.

It was a relief to  _ see _ properly again, out on the balcony. Riven had been written with friendliness to Gehn's half-D'ni eyes in mind, and so the lights in the bedroom--even the skylight--were designed for Atrus' eyesight at most.

Atrus still used goggles in brightest sun. The brightest days of Achenar's childhood on Myst had been about as much as Atrus could stand.

Achenar had spent his entire time on Haven adjusting to life under full sun. He could adjust down to cavern-dark if he needed to, he was sure, but his eyes were as slow to adjust between extremes as his D'ni ancestors.

He knew because he and Vahtah had compared observations the one time so far that she had come back with her father and she had been born on a bright Age. Talking about anything and everything in English was the only thing they could think of that could help get him the toehold on D'ni culture that could open up the language at his age. And it was the culture that was most important, since he wasn't planning to ever move to the colony. Or visit, much as she wanted him to see it.

Things might have been different for Atrus if Grandmother Ti'ana hadn't been so careful about keeping him hidden and keeping his eyes protected from the light. That much they both agreed on. If Vahtah's wholly D'ni eyes could grow up strong in brightness when given the challenge from the first days, then Atrus' quarter-D'ni eyes might have.

The balcony had a guard-rail protecting him from the drop to the water. The balcony had two locked doors protecting it from the Link point on the studies' entrance garden. Once he was fit to be up and out, he could spend as much safe time there as he wanted.

And he wanted a lot after spending so long under a solid roof with solid walls.

* * *

There was a smell in the air on the twentieth day, and Atrus spent the morning bustling about. Achenar thought of it as his usual mid-experiment behavior, but couldn't understand what was going on.

Until the wind shifted slightly and he caught himself tensing.

It smelled different from the way it did on Haven--on Haven, there were plants and animals already under stress and showing it by this point--but there was definitely rain on the way.

"Father?" he asked with worry in his voice.

"Did I ever tell you about the time Grandmother and I danced in the rain at the Cleft?" Atrus asked him with a laugh. "It's less than a day's journey that way." He pointed.

"When I was small."  _ When she was there to tell it, too. _

"Well, we have all the fresh water we could ever need from the stream here. But I still can't bear to waste water from the sky in this desert. There's no logical sense to it, it's just too precious..."

"... Too precious a gift from the Maker to take lightly," Achenar finished out the thought with his own feelings about it. Atrus left him the space to keep talking if he wanted. "I know what you mean, at least a bit. I wash things in the lake--it's closed water, there were things hunting on Haven' beaches that made wahrks look tame before I killed them off but don't tell Mother I said that  _ please _ \--but when I can choose it I drink caught rainwater."

"That's why you want more canteens?"

Achenar nodded. "They've also been the only option I had when I was too injured to safely go to the lake edge. I never managed to hook up a means to refill from the lake from the lakehouse, the shore was right there."

"The next time that happens, you could just come here," Atrus offered as he adjusted the positions of some of the plants from the kitchen he'd brought out onto the balconies. "We're only a Linking Book away now."

The first droplets hit Achenar in the face.

Atrus laughed. "I never knew how much I missed desert rains until we thought it was never safe to come back to this Age."

It was strange, hearing him laugh like that so soon after Sirrus' death, but that was grief and life. And Sirrus' death was not like the other times Achenar had watched a parent mourn a child.

He shivered at the memory, raindrops shaking off his nose. Atrus thankfully didn't notice.

Atrus started singing in D'ni. Achenar recognized it as a hymn to the Maker but couldn't understand anything but the most basic religious terms and the Maker's name.

He headed back inside, preferring to watch from the dry through the open door, and wondered.

Why in all the Ages would the D'ni have a hymn for rainstorms when they didn't depend on rain?

_ One more thing I'll have to ask Vahtah some day. _

* * *

On the twenty-fifth day since Achenar awoke in his parents' bed, Achenar was finally stable enough on his feet for the walkways between the family compound's rooms.

And for the first time since the fateful day he'd been trapped, he ate at a table with other human beings.

He'd been eating at tables by himself ever since pulling out of his mental collapse early on, of course. He'd had to. Acting like a being from a species advanced enough to have a culture that included food-linked ritual tasks had been the only way to not lapse down into acting--into  _ thinking _ \--like a being that wasn't.

He'd frightened himself badly when he realized he'd been wasting that much energy on land barriers against creatures that flew. And he'd known they flew the entire time. And he'd kept that damn gate up and made himself walk through it whenever he needed to go grab something from the ship or the shore. (Even now, the zipchair from his dwelling with the mangrees couldn't take much extra weight.)

After that, he ate with plates and utensils he scavenged from the ship. If he drank from the lake, he used a canteen or a cup. He took up painting and journaling to pass the time once there was nowhere left to explore and the southern mangrees were helping him find pigment sources. He'd even tried his hand at primitive pressed-reed paper when he'd finally recognized the plants by the lake might be strong enough.

But it had all just been a trick to keep his mind together. As if he was on an extended camping trip instead of in a prison Age and anyone he cared about could come in for a visit at any time.

_ Now, they can, _ he thought suddenly. It was strange to have it not be a self-deception after so long.

Atrus raised an eyebrow at him from across the table.

"Just thinking how long it's been," he said softly, trying to keep things light.

"That doesn't matter now," his mother told him. "What matters is that what's left of us can gather at a table for a meal."

Sirrus' absence hung over everything. Achenar suspected it always would. But they were recovering day by day from the things he'd done to them, the things he'd manipulated them into doing.

And Achenar was never going to be so disconnected from other humans that he risked losing his mind again. He'd been promised that by his father and by the priest.

His mother moved to pass him a bowl and he froze. He took a deep breath, trying to explain to himself what the problem was.

"It may be better to let me go last, until I'm used to leaving enough for others to eat after me again," he told her with forced levity. "And, um..."

He felt himself blush.

How, after a childhood around a communal table, could he admit the muscle memory of how to physically handle passed dishes was gone?

Ti'ana would have been ashamed of his manners, she'd managed to keep Atrus in better shape growing up when it was just the two of them and a hole in the ground.

"There's no shame here and now," Atrus said quietly. "We all know how long you were alone. No one else is going to see."

"Although it is a small enough table asking people to pass things may work just as well," his mother offered as she redirected the dish over towards Yeesha. "And asking you to hold up full communal bowls is a bit much this soon after you were lying in bed for so long."

Achenar nodded gratefully.

There was a long way to go before he'd fit in among other humans again, but this was a start. A good start.

And then he could figure out the balance between being Achenar son of the Age of Earth and Achenar neighbor to mangrees. With no one anywhere to lead him astray again.

"This feels  _ right _ ," Yeesha commented when they were all pleasantly full and contentedly sitting around in the living space after the meal. She'd sat near Achenar, still trying to have as much brother-time as she could.

"This place was built to grow into," Atrus told her. "You growing up, enough space that one more at table wouldn't be too many in the slightest. We hoped for so long it might be safe someday, Achenar..."

"You do know I'm still planning to go back?" Achenar told him gruffly.

Atrus nodded. "And this is is still Tomahna, in any case. There will be space for you to visit."

Achenar raised an eyebrow. "That's a D'ni name."

"It means 'home'," Yeesha told him.

"Now  _ that's _ presumptuous," Achenar dared to comment out loud.

"Not really." Atrus smiled. "And do you remember  _ why _ we named it 'home', Yeesha?"

"Because every Linking Book the D'ni and their descendants have ever written back to the Age of Earth described this river flowing down into D'ni cavern, and every master in the Writer's Guild knew the passage by heart before they could be granted that rank?"

"Exactly. And it's close enough to the Cleft to be 'home' to our family in particular in another sense as well. No matter where we wander, this is where we come back to in the end. The only older place we've known is a dead world, Garternay-Before-D'ni."

"I've heard the few legends Grandmother had," Achenar told him.

"We know more now," Catherine told him with an edge in her voice.

"That sorrow can wait," Atrus agreed. "But we do know more. And we know for certain now that Ri'neref was right to split from everyone else who left and come here. Where this river goes underground to water the great cavern of D'ni."

"I used to want to see it someday. Now, I think I'd feel too closed in with rock walls, even that far apart and that high above my head."

"I think it would have been too much for me if I hadn't grown up in the Cleft," Atrus agreed. "None of the survivors we've found fled to Ages that were Linked underground. The colony is aboveground, and from what I saw on Haven you'd probably be comfortable enough there."

"If I was comfortable about the people," Achenar reminded with trepidation.

"You might surprise yourself," Yeesha told him.

Achenar reached out, pulled her close. "We'll see."


End file.
